Ditch the Diet — Lose Weight Through Habits

René Rosendahl
16 min readJan 27, 2021

Not happy with your weight? Welcome to the club! Few people are. And let’s face it: Weight management is tough; weight loss is even tougher!

And getting older sure doesn’t help. On the contrary: New research at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden has uncovered why that is: Lipid turnover in the fat tissue decreases during aging and makes it easier to gain weight, even if we don’t eat more or exercise less than before. According to US News and World Report, as we get older, we experience muscle loss, hormonal changes, and slowed metabolism, all of which affect our weight. Additionally, we tend to be more sedentary and stressed than in our younger years.

Sure, there are all kinds of diets out there and you might have tried of few of them yourself. Unfortunately, there seems to be a common pattern: You try a diet, make changes to how you eat for a while and stick with it, and you see some improvement. At some point, you either achieve your goal weight (or reach a “good enough” point) or simply give up. Then you quickly slide back into your old eating patterns and the weight creeps up again. After a while, you get frustrated enough to start all over again. Sound familiar? It’s a vicious cycle.

So what’s the problem here? In most cases, diets end up being a temporary change to your eating patterns. They don’t stick. They don’t…

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René Rosendahl

Thinker, writer, product guy, developer, and exercise fanatic.